Character Backstories from the Untamed North
by Oryx
Summary: These are the background mini-stories of the characters that I created for my Icewind Dale 2 party, and their histories tie into Baldur's Gate characters as well.. Eclectic, light reading. Enjoy!
1. Chyrel'Dalis, Thief in the City of Doors

Chyrel'Dalis  
Tiefling  
Chaotic Neutral  
Rogue-Transmuter  
  
Portrait at   
  
The tiefling girl Chyrel'Dalis both was and was not an orphan, for she grew up without her parents, but in the care of her much older brothers Jakk', Seth', and Haer'Dalis, who raised their kid sister in a loving, if unconventional, manner. The three bardic brothers ran the Random Rogues, an eclectic "troupe" of canny characters, each varying degrees of scoundrel and entertainer, based out of "the house that Jakk built": the Bohemian Rhapsody, a multi-story inn/tavern/theater/casino/brothel/residence located in the pumping heart of the Sigil.   
  
Chyrel was helping her brothers run the operation as soon as she could walk, and grew up around actors and acrobats, bartenders, bouncers, and burglars, card-sharks, comedians, courtesans, and cutpurses, magicians and merchants, smugglers, strippers, and swindlers. Curious and quick-minded, she was learning all sorts of tricks of their trades and fast becoming a wily little rogue and a silver-tongued lass, and even picked up a cantrip or two, all of which her brothers gleefully encouraged.   
  
Many of the other Random Rogues were also siblings of Chyrel, and with the nature of her upbringing, it was pretty quick she got to wondering just where they'd all come from. So her eldest brothers sat her down and told her about their mother Eave'Dalis. Long, long ago, she had been a young, lowly rogue herself growing up in the City of Doors, but had worked her way up (remember, her brothers would tell her, direction is all relative in the multiverse) to a courtesan who granted her company to some of the most illustrious, powerful, or mysterious folk in all the Lower Planes, rumoredly including the eternal villain Tyranthraxus, the demon prince Demogorgon, the Lady of Pain herself, and even gods like Bane, Myrkul, Mask, and Bhaal. Apparently she didn't have the time or the inclination to raise her own many children, and would leave one (or several) now and again in the care of her first three sons. Some of the children still lived or worked at, or at least frequented, the Rhapsody, some showed up once in a three blue moons, and some had not been seen since leaving the original three brothers' care.   
  
Jakk the Jester, the eldest, had grown up centuries ago a true orphan, left as a newborn with the legendary, interplanar, but now-long-disbanded Chaos Circus, becoming a swashbuckling clown and "Jakk of all trades". He was one day suddenly visited by his mother Eave and given ample money to buy a plot in Sigil and build and run the Rhapsody, and none too soon had she given him baby Seth as well, who became a bard like his brother, though he preferred epic tales to comic gimmicks and was thus nicknamed the Skald. Haer had arrived a few years later, and he too was performing as soon as he could walk and talk, and quickly took a liking to emulating dashing, womanizing heroes both living and legendary, and the sword-spinning seducer beknighted himself the Blade. Many, many years and 'Dalis children later, Chyrel herself had arrived.   
  
And so, with her carefree brothers watching over her with an extremely loose hand, so to speak, she grew into an alluring and crafty young tiefling woman, with a delicate, deft, desirable, and deadly body suiting her profession, a shimmering, outrageous waterfall of blinding orange hair, and acute eyes and ears on an elegant and deceptively innocent face. Though surrounded by her attentive eldest three brothers, many of their other beloved siblings, an endless cast of other unique characters, and wonders from across all known existence, and living a fast, risque lifestyle in the heart of the multiverse's nexus, Chyrel often found herself feeling paradoxically alone.   
  
It wasn't long before she was making romps about the Sigil and occasionally other planes, sometimes with her brothers but usually alone, snatching purses, jimmying strongboxes, or just poking her ever-curious tiny nose around. Her portal-hopping heritage and her brothers' philosophies on physical reality began to refine her idle curiosity of arcana into a budding interest in alteration magic, and sneaking into a wizard-apprentice talent show once, she met another tiefling girl who would soon become her closest (only close) friend.   
  
This was the orphaned necromancess Chamilienne, whom she first saw performing a feat involving reanimating a dead dogoat (a hellish canine-goat hybrid that will bark at almost anything and then eat it) and making it do tricks. United by mutual loneliness as well as their inherent chemistry, the girls quickly became best friends and spent much of their time together, tinkering with materials or magic, exploring the city and the planes, and playing practical jokes on various individuals. When "Chami" finished her apprenticeship, she agreed to move to the Rhapsody as Chyrel's roommate, and as a Random Rogue helped her brothers appraise enchanted loot that they and the other Rogues "recovered."   
  
Chami soon took an apparently reciprocated liking to Haer, and Chyrel cautioned her dear friend about her brother's unpredictable nature, but had to stand back while they careened ahead with an absorbing affair. Chyrel found herself feeling lonelier than ever, and took solitary, introspective sojourns around the multiverse while her friend and brother went on extravagant, romantic vacations, or even just disappeared into Haer's room together with a stash of black lotus and other goodies, to remain unseen (yet heard and smelled) for days at a time. Chyrel felt a guilty (but anticipated) relief when her brother dropped Chami like a holy potato, and in fact, after purportedly being attacked by the enraged necromancess, fled and disappeared for quite awhile.   
  
Chyrel's heart sank into her small feet, however, when Jakk and Seth banished Chami from the Rogues and the Rhapsody, and her anguished pleadings before her usually kind and generous brothers fell on four deaf (if extensively pierced) ears. Fearful of losing her soulmate forever, Chyrel caught Chami before she left, and agreed to join her in whatever else might lie ahead. She placated her fuming, heartbroken friend by expressing shared ire at her brothers and proposing a vacation of their own to Neverwinter in the Prime.   
  
After several blissful weeks of frolicking through the city's famous gardens, scouring its varied (by Prime standards) array of shops, and moonbathing on the beaches, it was there that the girls heard about the troubles in the north of Faerun and the call for mercenaries of all stripes. They went north to Chami's hometown of Luskan to set sail, under the shadow of the awed and feared Hosttower of the Arcane, where Chami had been raised, where her mother had been murdered, and where the thusly-responsible crony of her brutal high captain stepfather (now dead but succeeded by his even more ruthless son) now reigned supreme. When Chami grasped her hand and declared with an angry hiss that once they had become the most powerful necromancess and transmutress in the worlds that they would rid the city of the warlocks and warlords and then they and they alone would rule the Hosttower and Luskan together, Chyrel only smiled. 


	2. Chamilienne Spectrana, Hosttower Hellspa...

Chamilienne Spectrana  
Tiefling  
Chaotic Evil  
Fighter-Necromancer  
  
Portait at:   
  
A Luskan native, born Chamilienne Spectrana Malannan, "Chami" was born at midnight of the winter solstice in the harsh winter of 1292 DR, to Lady Serpenienne Spectrana, then one of the most cunning and influential wizards of Luskan's infamous Hosttower of the Arcane. Not only a fearsome mage in her own right, Lady Serpenienne was also wife of Lord Harkon Malannan, a high captain of Luskan, and one of the most ruthless and powerful at that. (Historical note: One of Lord Malannan's servants, the elf Cylilia, mothered in 1262 DR the now-infamous bard Cyri, best known as a "heroine" numbering among the six credited with averting demonic and barbarian invasions of the Ten-Towns of Icewind Dale in 1281 DR; and it is speculated that Cyri's human blood is Harkon's; although Cyri herself is known to say that all she learned from once asking was of the back of Harkon's hand.)   
  
Chami as a young girl was close to her mother, who encouraged her daughter's early and eager, almost obsessive, dabblings in arcana; and the girl even spent much time in the Hosttower itself from her infancy on, and it can only be wondered what things she might have seen - or partaken in. Lord Malannan, little better a father to her than to his servants' children (of which there were quite a few), spoiled but neglected her, engendering or at least exercising the paradoxic blend of passionate covetousness and cold detachment that would grow more a hallmark of Chami as she grew. Harkon's interest would grow along with her, for the worse, for when the girl reached her teens and her friends (or agemates, at least) were just beginning to show signs of womanhood, Chami exhibited additional characteristics, such as thin fangs among her secondary teeth, a slightly forked tongue, and a dry, scaly texture to her fair skin.   
  
It would be then that Lord Harkon would learn, upon inquiring about this to one of his own "friends," a Hosttower warlock and adversary of Serpenienne, that the Lady had, the spring prior to Chami's birth, engaged in an obscure summoning ritual that may have gated into her Hosttower quarters none other than the demon Incubus, a fiend of a fiend indeed. Without a word to his wife, Harkon conspired with the warlock, and in less than a fortnight, the woman was found dead in her own lab, having apparently burned to death horribly after mixing the wrong spell components during an relatively simple experiment.   
  
Harkon next turned his attention to the daughter whose tiefling lineage would soon become publicly noticable, but his falling sword went astray when he was inexplicably blinded midswing, and felt his daugter's venomous fangs in his neck. Rather than face the wrath of her half-brothers (the eldest of which actually turned out to be less than grieved at his father's passing), Chami that moment gathered her few dearest belongings and fled into the streets of Luskan, knowing not where she'd go in a city of pirates that would find one and only one inevitable use for an orphan girl like her. Still she ran with some instictive course, and indeed it was her heritage leading her straight to a little-known planar portal in the city.   
  
Chamilienne then found herself in the Sigil, an other-planar city that was completely unfamiliar, barely comprehendable, and many times as dangerous. However, the Sigil also offers many times the opportunities, and she soon made her way, earning further education and a few coins to spare under the wing (literally) of a harpy necromancess, and there she began to develop a particular, almost addictive, interest in the deathly arts. During this time she found a good friend in a fellow tiefling girl, the rogue Chyrel'Dalis, and when her apprenticeship ended, she moved in with Chyrel and joined the eclectic "troupe" run by the girl's older brothers, the bards Jakk, Seth, and Haer.   
  
Chyrel worked largely as a cutpurse, and Chami found her niche using her arcane and alchemic knowledge, or an outright divination now and then, to appraise what Chyrel and the other pickpockets and burglars "found," using her Hosttower-garnered lore to fill in the occasional gaps in Chyrel's brothers' extensive knowledge. This work led to many extended discussions with Haer in particular of the multiverse's many facts and tales, which the canny bard was always overflowing with and eager to dispense, telling her among other things that her serpentine features (which he confessed to adoring, even fetishizing) were the mark of "snake-blood" - a yuan-ti somewhere in her ancestry, and not from Incubus (whom Haer knew and even let slip that he had some sort of running wager with, but never said more) - though the fusion with fiend-blood had apparently brought out whatever her mother Serpenienne had carried.   
  
As Haer filled her ear, he spilled into her heart, and the cold-hearted young necromancess's penchant for the occasional burst of obsessive passion was sparked for the bard, who perhaps sensed this and quickly professed his own deep, mad, and undying love for her. A torrid, all-consuming relationship ensued, despite Chyrel's occasional and private warnings to her friend regarding her older brother's fickle history, and Haer took his new girlfriend on all sorts of vacation-romps across the Planes - gold-dust-downhill-skiing on Mount Celestia, extravagant shopping sprees in Bytopia, romantic, secluded camping trips in Arborea - though Chami found that the more she learned, the more she regarded most of existence with detached interest, and so few things with any love.   
  
She found it easy to embrace her boyfriend's Doomguard ethics, despite its contrary nature to the necromantic arts; and this rift would in due time prove to be Haer's staging point for his explanation of why they simply weren't meant to be together after all. Chami nearly killed him with her bare fangs and now-clawlike nails in her ensuing fit of rage, but the bard scampered away with five parallel claw-scratches down his chin, and a fang slash along each cheek, not to be seen again for some time. Seth and Jakk quickly banished Chami from the troupe in hopes of luring their brother back. Chami cursed the skald and the jester for the injustice, but as she took her leave, Chyrel found and soothed her by expressing mutual disgust for her three brothers' behavior, and the two decided to cool off with a jaunt to the Prime, specifically the beaches, gardens, and shops of Neverwinter, before finding some new line of work (like thievery) together.   
  
There they heard about the call for mercenaries in the besieged far North, and made their way up to Luskan, where Chami found the Hosttower now run by the warlock who had slain her mother. Swearing vengeance for the loss of one of the few she had ever loved (and, for the loss of the other, still promising herself eventual revenge against him and his brothers, a thought she opted not share with Chyrel), Chami's desire to become a great and terrible wizardess, and a fearsome swordswoman if necessary, solidified her decision to become an adventurer, alongside Chyrel, bound for Icewind Dale. 


	3. Unis, orcmonk of the Broken Ones

Unis  
Half-Orc  
Lawful Good  
Monk of the Broken Ones  
  
The unions from which half-orc children result are often ill-recorded and ill-natured, and so it was with the boy known as Unis. What little he knows he was told by the Ilmatari monks who raised him. It was a sweltering summer in the great tracts of desert between the Hordelands and Kara-Tur, and bands of orcs were about as usual, though the monastery worried not; it had gone unattacked for decades by the monsters, who knew that the monks had little of value, and defended themselves well. And so it would remain this summer, but the happenings of the monks and the orcs would not remain completely divested.  
  
It was one morning, Unis's master would later tell him, that the western woman showed up outside the monastery walls. She was starved, battered, and indeed near death. She collapsed unconscious at their gate, but the monks took her in and cared for her, yet her life held ever by a thread. The monks told Unis little of what she had looked like, shunning extended appraisal of the countenance of a woman, but would say that she had been graceful and fair, yet ever sad and in shadow.  
  
Even when she regained enough health to speak, she proved amnesiac and half-sane. It was through random utterances and voiced nightmares that the monks would learn her terrible tale. She had been a maiden traveling with her merchant parents' caravan when they had been ambushed by the orcs. Most were killed and the stores ravaged, but some were left alive - and ravaged themselves. With almost ironic mercy of circumstance, the severe violence, starvation, and horror of her treatment had rendered her traumatized, and she remembered little of the tragedy beyond her nightmares, not even how she had escaped; the monks assumed she must have been left for dead, too withered for the foul orcs to even care to eat.  
  
But, in the monastery's care, some flesh return to her bones, and that of her belly swelled most of all, for she was pregnant. Still frail, it was difficult for her, and its final toll was her life, ending peacefully the very moment Unis was born.  
  
The monks cared for the boy as they had the mother, ever carrying a guilt for her death that Unis would inheret as he learend the martial and philosophical ways of the Broken Ones. He grew into a stocky, jutting-jawed young man, able to hold his tusks within his wide cheeks, and it was speculated that the boy's unknown orcish father had himself been part human.  
  
As Unis matured, though, he attained both the superhuman strength of a monster and the careful wisdom of an evolved being, even developing with his master a furious new style of unarmed combat, a kickboxing-like system that emphazied his unique muscular power. Though wise, Unis still felt now and again the beastly call in his blood, but also the guilt for the very nature of his being. The suffering of his mother weighed heavily upon him: he had taken her life in beginning his own, a burden upon his heart, which pumped the blood that had been so ruefully merged with hers.  
  
As he reached his twentieth year, his masters had no more to teach him, except to say that the outside world did. And so Unis set out into the wide world, wandering ever west across the Hordelands, the Wastes, the Anauroch Desert, and the Savage Frontier, eventually making his way north and west to Luskan, with an eternal vow to use his mind and hands to prevent and avenge the suffering of the innocent, for he carried his father's power in his limbs, his master's teachings in his head, and his mother's suffering in his heart. 


	4. Verania deVir, invoking provocateur

A daughter of Ginafae deVir, matron and namesake of the fourth house of Mezoberranzan, Verania deVir enjoyed many early years of power and luxury that spoiled her thoroughly. Or perhaps it was more intrinsic; from babehood on she proved impatient and greedy, though not without the lust and ambition to seize for herself what was not freely given. And that she did well on many occasions, through cunning and charm exceptional even for a drow, an expert at manipulation, intimidation, and deception.   
Verania deVir  
Drow Elf  
Neutral Evil  
Bard-Sorceress  
  
Performance in general, perhaps because of her incessant desires to be the center of attention, proved both her forte and her primary pursuit. With an unquenchable exhibitionist streak she staged numerous performances, the supporting cast usually culled from thespian slaves, clebrating the glory of her house, her goddess Lolth, or drow culture at large, always with undeniable zeal and talent, and she grew fond of boasting that charm was in her very blood.   
  
She found herself to be right, in a way, for as she reached drow maturity, she found herself exhibiting faint telekinetic powers, and upon demanding answers to her mother, the matron would calmly explain that her father must have been the personal slave that had been a house sorcerer (until she broke him), a male supposedly descended from Synix'llisin'icon, a fabled black dragon that had, the myth goes, flown from another universe with a wraith-knight upon his back many ages ago. Verania kept her talent private, and practiced it in secret, lest it somehow be used against her, and continued with more fervor than ever her obscene lifestyle of so many public performances and personal slaves, and had she been more introspective, which she was not, might have noted the paradox of her nature - an inherent love of attention from anyone, though she despised everyone.   
  
She brushed it all off as her way of getting ahead, but her material and social status would in time diminish with her house's, culminating when one of her sisters, the priestess Viconia, betrayed Lolth. The unthinkable emabrrassment was compounded when their male sibling Valas proved traitorous as well by narrowly foiling his sister's execution. Valas was given a new life as a drider, but Viconia escaped unpunished to the surface world. Not long after, the house finally fell, to the mere ninth house Do'Urden of the city of all things.   
  
Humiliated and enraged, Verania sold much of what (and whom) she possessed, and with her sister Visinia took over a Mezoberranzan tavern-playhouse. Verania was disgusted that she would have to work like a commoner, but found some solace in continuing her theatrical pursuits, which usually starred herself and retained her characteristic blend of provocative and propagandic material. The sisters' entrepreneurial venture earned them much wealth, if only a tiny fraction of what they once knew, and an even paler shadow of their former status, though Verania quickly surrounded herself with choice male slaves once again.   
  
Her favorite was the young warrior Arsenal Za'rath, a male of unknown lineage but rare skill in several respects. A swordsman also of some magical talent, he had just returned from a surface raid with the mercenary company she had purchased him from. Unfortunately, after an all-too-brief time in her covetous and demanding possession, he would mysteriously disappear, and Verania would learn upon angry inquisition of the mercenaries more about that surface raid. Arsenal's squad, engaging a platoon of paladins in a forest skirmish, had had the battle interrupted when both groups were overpowered and captured alike by a horde of vicious wild elves. The few surviving drow and men had languished in remote captivity for days, but some of the drow had eventually escaped, been found by a retrieval party (they had been considered worth the investment) and brought, though starved, scarred, and sunburnt, back to the Underdark. It had since been beaten out of one of the mercenary-slaves, however, that they had omitted from their original story that, despite the deeply ingrained hatreds on both sides, the men and drow had realized they would have to work together to have any hope of escaping. They did so, and apparently, it had been learned, even then parted without ever finishing their fight.   
  
It wasn't long before reports reached Mezoberranzan of a lone male having recently escaped to the surface via the same tunnel the raiding party had used, nor much longer still before a truly wild rumor germinated - that a drow wizard-paladin of Mystra had appeared on the surface world. Verania couldn't have spun a more despicable story herself and was livid. Her worst fears came true when this rumor was popularly connected with the story of her own missing slave, and she was publicly humiliated beyond anything she could have imagined. She decided the only way to regain any shred of respect was to personally make the dangerous trek to the surface and reclaim her rightful slave.   
  
She bad barely gotten to that empty, blinding place when she recieved the worst possible news from below - her sister Visinia had betrayed her, fueling the wildest variations of the rumors that she herself had encouraged Arsenal's traitorous behavior, and gone to the surface to join him and her fellow Lolth-renouncing sister Viconia. The matrons, ready to believe yet another deVir had gone renegade, had the city guard ready to arrest, if not slay, her on sight. Visinia, of course, had thus claimed her sister's stake in the playhouse and her slaves and other possessions.   
  
Verania realized there was no turning back now, even though this was, for her even more than most drow, the worst place imaginable - where she was a pariah, forced to stay out of sight, where the attention she was so addicted to meant death. And yet her skills would be put to the test: she would coax and charm Arsenal if she could, and use her innate powers to forcibly enchant him if she had to. She followed rumors of her quarry to Luskan, for she now had only one ticket out of this accursed sun-scorched world and back to the Underdark: Arsenal Za'rath, subjugated, broken, and enslaved. 


	5. Arsenal Za'rath, drow dogooder

Arsenal Za'rath  
Drow Elf  
Lawful Good  
Paladin-Mage of Mystra  
  
Arsenal Za'rath was born to Mezoberranzan commoners and immediately sold into slavery, although he does not even remember it. Rather, this is what he was told by members of the house D'Lakten, which he grew up in the service of, as a boy slave charged with endless menial chores and given little sustenance or comfort in return. Always he bore his dismal lot with a stoic humility though, not the truly broken, zombielike acceptance of many a male slave, but rather with a quiet transcendence; an externally impassive front while his thoughts, whatever they might have been, were not quelched within.   
  
As he grew to a youth, his athletic body would earn the eye of the matron Grey-Faal D'Lakten and he would be made both an apprentice house weaponsmaster and her pleasure slave. He bore it all as stoically as ever, even optimistically focusing on honing his skills rather than bemoaning his lack of choice of station, and over time even began to pick up a rudimentary understanding of magic from a house wizard.   
  
This continued well enough and after several more years he was also conscripted to the house D'Lakten's slave/mercenary active fighting force, and he managed to survive several battles between his house and others, even once being forced in Grey-Faal's name to duel to the death a rival house's weaponsmaster; and eventually he was transferred to a surface-raiding unit.   
  
Their target was a certain moon elf settlement in the High Forest. Newly-founded, small, and remote, it was of no obvious value, and thus it was rumored this place must have had some secret importance; strategic, cultural, or magical; though Arsenal heard only a dozen conflicting and equally haphazard rumors. And when the raid began, Arsenal would see the surface world for the first time.   
  
To most drow, it was a horrible place, empty and scorching, the night almost as bright and exposed as the day, where a drow felt he would fall, not down, but up, into that endless abyss called the sky, in which the cruel burning face glared down upon all. To Aresenal's pensive and latently intellectual mind, it was a curiosity; dangerous for a drow to be sure, but arguably less than the more familiar Underdark; and the same courage that allowed him to fight or please with death at his heels allowed him to consider this new place in a calm, rational way. And he found that he grew to like it, though he could not find the words for why.   
  
The raid, which should have been a simple pillage-burn-flee affair, turned into a complicated fiasco. Barbaric wild elves that inhabited the forest were also attacking the settlement, and this should have made their job easier, but these primitives fought the drow on sight as well, though often they themselves went unseen, expert at hiding and ambushing in their home terrority. Worse and stranger still, a platoon of human and half-elven paladins arrived at the settlement to bolster their moon elven allies; and despite the convential wisdom of men as bumbling and forest-unwise, these proved accomplished hunters and fighters, able to see the drow raiders' very evil itself no matter where they hid. During a full onslaught between the factions, Arsenal and the other dark elves were captured, along with the paladins, by an overpowering ambush of the wild elves. Most were slain; the rest taken into captivity where they were mistreated and interrogated.   
  
While his drow comrades howled at the paladins with every anti-human, anti-knight, and anti-good epithet they knew, and the men yelled back with a slew of self-righteous and drow-hating slogans, each blaming and cursing the other rather than their common captors, Arsenal sat quietly in his bonds, staring into the next wooden cage at a golden-eyed man who sat just as calmly.   
  
At one point the vicious wild elves decided to mix the men and drow in the cages for some real fun; and while many spat in each others' faces or even wriggled in their bonds enough to scratch and bite, Arsenal sat quietly, tied next to the man with the golden eyes. Soon, they would take to speaking, in common, when they could get away with it, and would learn much about one another.   
  
This paladin was Sir Eromus Prime, an aasimar, a man with celestial blood, born of a man and a deva. He shared with Arsenal, in a manner conversational and not preachy, philosophies of his god Lathander, philosophies of humility and hope; the things that Arsenal had always used to see himself through. Eromus admitted how drow were, yes, oft persecuted on the surface, no matter their individual nature, but that men and surface elves were not all bad, just as he knew all drow were not.   
  
Eromus spoke, in fact, of several specific anecdotes of surface-dwelling drow he had crossed paths with or heard of, and told one story of a drow woman that his father Maximus had known some dozen years before, one Viconia deVir, recent expatriate of the Underdark. He had saved her from death at the stake in Waterdeep, allowing her then to suffer his company. He tried gently to convert her from evil, with hopeful early results, before she then fled, purportedly south towards Baldur's Gate.   
  
Questions began to stir within Arsenal's head, but their present captivity required more immediate attention. With their current mistreatment and malnourishment, even though Arsenal and Eromus both bore it with great endurance, they could not physically last much longer. Eromus told Arsenal that he had managed to befriend in secret one of the wild elves, a young ranger, and she was willing to secretly betray her own tribe and help them escape. The aasimar and the drow together fomented a plan of escape that would involve a holy invocation, a cantrip, and the help of the uncaptive and locally knowledgable elf maiden. Arsenal and Eromus thus managed to get free one moonless night, and freed the all-to-few others that had lived, and the remaining squads of men and drow ran off through the woods and parted without ever finishing their fight.   
  
Arsenal and his comrades were soon rescued by a backup party and taken back down to the Underdark, starved, beaten, and sunburnt. As soon as Arsenal was healed just enough to look his best again, he was sold by matron Grey-Faal, perhaps because she had grown bored of him, was disgusted by his raiding party's failure, or needed the money, to Verania deVir, formerly of the now-fallen House deVir. Verania now ran with one of her sisters a tavern-playhouse in Mezoberranzan, and there Arsenal came to live and work as a bodyguard, performer, and pleasure slave. He bore her treatment, even harsher and demanding than Grey-Faal's, with his usual stoicism and humility, becoming the outlet for the fallen noblewoman's rage, but now more complex thoughts ran through his mind, and he thought often of the surface world above, and of the golden-eyed man he had made and escaped with, and of the stories and philosophies he had heard. The golden-eyed man had given him the word for that inexplicable thing about the surface: Freedom.   
  
Luckily for him, Verania deVir the innkeeper hadn't nearly the security that Grey-Faal D'Lakten the maton had had, relying primarly, is is often the case in drow society, on simply ingrained fear, the lack of anywhere else to go, and the severe penalties for slaves being caught free. Fairly adept in the art of sneaking and hiding, he managed not only to escape from her clutches but to make his way back to the tunnel he had taken to the surface before, and escape form the Underdark. He wandered, avoiding the sun, bandits, and zealous drow-hunters, back to the moon elf settlement of all places, and to his relief found Eromus Prime still stationed there, nearly the last paladin remaining. With the raids from drow and wild elves subsided, Eromus was ready to leave his post and travel back to Neverwinter, his closest thing to a home, and Arsenal accompanied him on the journey.   
  
The two continued to share thoughts and beliefs along the road, and Arsenal gradually decided that surfacers in general, humans, and knights were not all so bad as what his rearing had taught him to believe; and he came to accept Eromus's ideals of liberty, justice, and compassion for all. As he slept one full-mooned night, he was visited in his dream by the Goddess of Magic herself, who bade him, if he really believed in this new way of life, as a warrior-wizard to swear and recieve knighthood in her name. He did so, and in the morning awoke a paladin of Mystra.   
  
In the morning, Eromus beamed and laughed heartily at this news, and when they reached Neverwinter, led him on several minor good deeds within the city, which Arsenal did with fervor, even though he recieved scorn as often as praise. Soon, when news of the gobloinoid raids in the North and the call for adventurers reached Neverwinter, Eromus and Arsenal would decide that the time to truly put their ideals to the test had come. 


	6. Eromus Prime, bright light knight

Eromus Prime  
Aasimar  
Lawful Good  
Paladin-Morninglord of Lathander  
  
Maximus Prime, a first generation paladin of modest but wholesome beginnings, was the son of a Longsaddle farmer and horsemaster, and that he should have become. But when Max was ambushed by and slew a wandering goblin scout in the fields one summer day, his subsequent warning to the town and his pitchfork-armed valor in the ensuing goblin raid caught the eye of an errant knight, Sir Galvaton Megaron, who had been passing through and fought alongside the villagers. Galvaton invited Max to return with him to Neverwinter as his squire, and with a farewell to his folks both reluctant and eager, the boy did just that.   
  
His career went smoothly until an unjust order by the predecessor of Lord Nasher to arrest an innocent merchant crossed his path with one Eroenne LeCam, a local young noblelady not blind to the corruption, nor to her own parents' stake it in, who lived a double life as a highborn daughter and as a vigilante. When she presented him with the full facts (past crossed mace and sword), he unabashedly disobeyed the city lord's order, and the ensuing scandal brought to light Eroenne's misadventures, but also much more, and several corrupt officials were happily deposed. After a short stint in city politics, Eroenne decided with Maximus instead to begin an adventurer's life, and the two left Neverwinter for the North, eventually ending up in Easthaven and numbering among the six "Heroes of Icewind Dale" as they became known.   
  
With Max now a battle-hardened paladin and Eroenne annointed a Lathanderian priestess (and no less fearsome a warrior) the two remained adventurers and champions (at one point pitting them against two of their former companions and fellow "heroes," the sirenesque bard Cyri and the wily wizard Xanaxorax). Eventually, however, the profession would catch up to them, at the bony hands of the sinister lich Kangaax (who thereafter was not reported again for many years). Maximus was freed from magical imprisonment by a surviving ally, who then gave him the grave news - Eroenne had been turned to dust by the vile creature.   
  
Maximus was grieved and enraged, and did naught but ceaselessly confront villain after villain for several years thereafter, fully ready to die in the line of duty. He only succeeding in growing in power, and he began even to summon devas to his side in battle. Imagine his joy when the one who came before him was none other than the angelic form of his beloved Eroenne, reinstated by Lathander as a celestial being. Max's relationship with this deva quickly became more than a professional one, and within the year, the boy christened Eromus was born; an aasimar, a human child with celestial blood, born in the Prime but gestated in Elysium. While his father continued to adventure and fight, often with his heavenly mother at his side, Eromus spent some of his childhood in Neverwinter in the care and training of now-half-retired "grandpa Galvaton," and also in Morninglory in the deitic court of "grandpa Lathander."   
  
He grew quickly into a fair and strong young man with a beaming smile and golden eyes, and it wasn't long before he too took up the mantle of paladin himself, but bearing his mother's more thoughtful and pious nature. He fully accepted Lathander's doctrine of optimism, compassion, and renewel, and had an almost unacceptably lighthearted charm by Helmite or Ilmatari standards, and grew fond of saying that better than to bear suffering was to prevent it, striking quickly and hard at evil, to redeem with charismatic words if possible, to destroy with strong swords if necessary. And both he did when he began minor questing; striking quickly but carefully, speaking eloquently but approachably with coaxing rather than scolding. He usually dressed and armored simply, often being mistaken for an ordinary swordsman, something he seemed to find unobjectionable, perhaps even useful; but on some occasions, donning priestly vestments, he seemed to connote a touch of the Morninglord's vanity too.   
  
This pervasive flexibility probably saved his life when, during a forest sortie with drow surface-raiders, both his squad of knights and the drow gang were captured alike by a barbaric tribe of wild elves. Eromus furtively befriended one of his captors, the young ranger Ravina, and also the drow slave-warrior Arsenal Za'rath. Eromus and Arsenal, by working together despite ingrained prejudices within many on their comrades, managed to escape, and after their allies were freed, the men and drow parted without a fight. Within the same season, still stationed nearby, Eromus would be visited again by Arsenal, who apparently had been taken back to the Underdark and sold to an exceedingly cruel and demanding mistress, the exhibitionist Verania deVir. With thoughts of a better world and better ideals now planted in his head, he had managed to escape Mezoberranzan and return to the surface, even though he knew full well life for a drow would be far from easy there.   
  
Eromus invited Arsenal to trek with him back to Neverwinter, sharing the thoughts and dialogues they had begun in captivity, and Arsenal's stoic but understandably cynical nature began to soften and warm. One morning along the road Eromus found that his new friend had seen Mystra in a dream that night, and awoken with the power - and responsibility - of a paladin at his fingertips. Though a true oddity that would be scorned and even at-face disbelieved by many in Neverwinter, Arsenal bore it with a humility that was self-respecting, as Eromus had taught him, not self-degrading, as the Underdark had tried. In that fair city, the two paladins learned of the need for warriors in the goblin-besieged Ten-Towns of Icewind Dale. Eromus, ironically following his father's footsteps in an effort to get out of his shadow, and Arsenal, ready to live a dangerous life as long as he was free, set out for the North. 


	7. Ravina, the wild wild elf

Ravina  
Wild Elf  
True Neutral  
Ranger-Druid  
  
The wild elf Ravina grew up wild indeed, among the Iililia tribe of her kinsfolk that lived a furtive existence deep in the thickest parts of the High Forest of the Savage Frontier, where even more civilized moon elves seldom dared set foot. The Iililia were a splinter of the extreme Shadow Druid sect, with the elder nature-shamans holding unquestioned theocratic sway over every aspect of tribal life, and Ravina, indoctrinated early like all the other elf-children, accepted their tenets without much thought to the contrary.   
  
Paradoxically, despite this stricture, the tribe would have had a chaotic, barbaric look to a casual observer (were he able to survive the encounter long enough to make such a judgment), with only the most rudimentary of toolmaking, and no architecture. These wild elves were essentially pre-agrarian gatherers, with land-manipulation (farming and building) and friend-murder (hunting and woodcutting) among their most forbidden tenets; and they mostly lived in the large trees of the High Forest, without so much as a grass hut or a rope bridge, working, playing, eating, loving, and sleeping all upon branches or grass.   
  
The tribe warriors used weapons entirely of (naturally-fallen) wood, and the only magicians of any sort were the tribe druids and the relatively high fraction of wild elves with sorcerous blood (there was no writing of any sort, either practical or magical). Ravina's parents fit in with the tribe seamlessly, not that even that mattered given the communal nature of tribal child-rearing. Though Ravina never openly questioned their doctrines, she found tribal life a bit stifling, even with the scattered wilderness existence, and happily took to long romps by herself, proving extremely competent in wilderness survival and navigation thanks both to her primitive upbringing and natural talents.   
  
When she came of age, she would make a long lone pilgrimage through the forest, and there cross paths briefly with a graceful, almost ethereal woman on a unicorn - the goddess Mielikki herself, who would charge her to take up the mantle of rangerhood, and when Ravina gave a joyful laugh, she was thus. The young elf-woman returned proudly to her tribe, but the druid elders were quietly yet perceptibly displeased with the individuality young Ravina was beginning to display.   
  
She would find herself confronted with this issue a few seasons later, during an event that greatly shook the entire tribe. Imbalanced (civilized) elves were beginning to spread deeper into the High Forest, nearer and nearer the Iililia, even hunting the animals the druids knew personally. The wild elves organized raiding parties to rebalance (reclaim) their environs, striking at the budding moon elf settlement and stunting its growth. Ravina was among these avengers, drafted for her martial and wilderness skills, but she was quietly reluctant, wincing with every moon elf cousin she slew.   
  
In an odd but somewhat beneficial complication, a series of drow surface-raids also befell the civilized settlement, and soon yet a fourth and unlikelier-still faction emerged when a platoon of human and half-elven paladins arrived, championing the ideals of civilization and pledging to help their innocent elven allies defend themselves and their new land (which by now, it was rumored even among the primitive wild elves, must have some strategic, cultural, or magical significance to be so fought over by these three other groups). Despite the superficial confluence of objectives between the wild and dark elves, the Iililia mistrusted the drow, who wantonly destroyed flora and fauna along with men and moon elves, and they wished themselves rid of all the outsiders.   
  
The druid elders fomented a plan to use their tribe's home advantage (both in practical knowledge of and spiritual link with the thick forest) and superior numbers to ambush the drow and the paladins together as they fought, killing many of both and taking the rest captive. Ravina, her skirmishing and leadership skills growing, was a party leader in this ambush; her ample use and development of her physical and intuitive talents distracting her from her conflicted inner mores. She also then watched over the men and drow in captivity, as they were abused, starved, and fruitlessly interrogated; and she became troubled again, indeed outright disgusted.   
  
Using solitary interrogation as a guise, she secretly took aside one of the men, the golden-eyed knight Eromus Prime, and spoke with him extensively. Despite the violent and messy backdrop of the affair, they spent nearly one full day together in peaceful seclusion, with dialogue flowing between childhoods, training, experiences, expectations, philosophies, and epiphanies; and Ravina was overcome that night with a sense of both wonder at what had been common and curiosity at what had been different. The next day she spoke with him again, and agreed to help free him, his comrades, and even his drow enemies, which he seemed to think could and would help in the affair and also said curiously 'even if my dark brothers escape, they'll not be free.' That night, the heist was carried out, and the men and drow (what few remained) escaped into the woods by her guidance, and she felt at peace, but strangely sad to see them go.   
  
It would not be much longer before, yearning to be free of her wild yet cloistering tribe, feeling a new and unfamiliar desire for which she found no sating among her people, and sensing in a few elder druids a vaguely suspicious ire following the affair, Ravina would with hardly a goodbye to even her parents strike out from the Iililia, bound for she knew not what. 


End file.
